Monthly Archives: August 2013

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“If the sun had been warming the Earth, that should have come to an end, and we should have seen temperatures start to go the other way,” space environment physics professor Michael Lockwood told National Geographic in 2007. But that didn’t happen; despite the ebb and flow of solar output, Earth steadily continued to heat up.

While both millennial and decadal fluctuations in solar strength can contribute to changes in Earth’s climate, scientists say the effects of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere far outweigh our sun’s effects.

Oh, bullshit! I don’t believe in this ‘religion’ either.

When the computer models they are using are accurate and powerful enough to ‘predict the future’ of earth’s climate, we humans will be able to control the climate ourselves. [I have a few years under my belt working with large, multi-input, computer models. Not wx or climate, but I know that right now the model they use has way too many assumptions and ‘best guess’ inputs, to be of predictive value. Bah!]

“This is something that’s too good of an opportunity to pass up,” said Richards. “It’s a great American dream to make money off a stupid political gaffe.”

Described on the website as “the World’s Most Delicious Dogs With Mocking Salacious Fun,” the Carlos Danger Weiner site invites visitors to “Take a picture of yourself with your Carlos Danger Weiner and send it out to your friends, or even people you don’t know at all!”

One of the underpinnings of successful representative government is that voters feel they can trust their representatives, and those in the bureaucracy to whom power is delegated, to follow the law. That trust in government officials’ willingness to follow the law is the foundation for a sense that the law is legitimate, so that citizens feel a duty to follow the law as well.

Another factor would be campaign spending. Millions of dollars of outside money poured into 2012 U.S. Senate elections. According to data from the Campaign Finance Institute, $315 million was spent on U.S. Senate campaigns in 2012. The U.S. Senate race in Virginia has $51 million in spending by itself. Under the pre-1913 voting rules, the candidates for that seat wouldn’t even be in play until after the November general election was over, so there would be no opportunity for special interests to invest in campaigns.

Now, a new document from Comcast appears to confirm suspicions that it was actually Prenda mastermind John Steele who uploaded those files.

If true, it would be a major blow to Prenda’s case. There could be an “implied license” to any porn uploaded by Prenda, since it was initiating the sharing of the copyrighted material. The complaints about piracy and lawsuits would be farces if Steele himself initiated the piracy.

…in 2012, an internal NSA audit found that the agency had violated privacy rules 2,776 times within just one year. The audit counted only violations at NSA’s Washington facilities — nearly 20 other NSA facilities were not included.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a moderate Democrat who has been on the Intelligence Committee since 2001, said in a speech last month: “I have not seen any indication that the bulk phone-records program yielded any unique intelligence that was not also available to the government through less intrusive means.” Presumably, NSA would have shared such positive evidence with the intelligence committees.

The raid on the Garden of Eden farm appears to be the latest example of police departments using SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics to enforce less serious crimes. A Fox television affiliate reported this week, for example, that police in St. Louis County, Mo., brought out the SWAT team to serve an administrative warrant. The report went on to explain that all felony warrants are served with a SWAT team, regardless whether the crime being alleged involves violence.

Its almost like ‘the people’ are being conditioned to expect Jack-Boot interactions with the police.

I put it down to: ‘well we got all this cool stuff free from the Feds, we created our SWAT unit, we better find a way to let them dress up and play urban soldiers.’

Federal agents have launched a criminal investigation of instructors who claim they can teach job applicants how to pass lie detector tests as part of the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on security violators and leakers.

It’s bullshit pseudo-science, used as a psychological club. If the cases were taken to the SCOTUS, the government would loose.

But Mr. Hentoff sees the surveillance state as a threat to free speech, too. About a year ago he went up to Harvard to speak to a class. He asked, he recalled: “How many of you realize the connection between what’s happening with the Fourth Amendment with the First Amendment?” He told the students that if citizens don’t have basic privacies—firm protections against the search and seizure of your private communications, for instance—they will be left feeling “threatened.” This will make citizens increasingly concerned “about what they say, and they do, and they think.” It will have the effect of constricting freedom of expression. Americans will become careful about what they say that can be misunderstood or misinterpreted, and then too careful about what they say that can be understood. The inevitable end of surveillance is self-censorship.

The case also illustrates the inherent problems when a nation’s laws are so contradictory and confusing that well-meaning people can’t easily follow them.

But in going to the feds, city officials ignored California’s crystal-clear civil-forfeiture law, which only allows cities to seek the forfeiture of property if it is tied to a criminal conviction. Anaheim didn’t seek clarity from the federal government. It sought a federal end-run that applies a looser standard and allows the city to keep 80 percent of the proceeds. This was about profits, not legal clarity.

Joanna Serra, who was a legislative assistant and the primary staff member on education issues for liberal Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin, is now working in government affairs for Higher One. A representative for Durbin confirmed that Serra left in July. She started working at Higher One on July 15, a company representative told BuzzFeed.

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Clarke–who initially flew from Amsterdam to Minneapolis and then on to Salt Lake City–claimed that he had a headache in the Netherlands. To ease the pain, “he decided to rub ‘peppermint oil’ on his forehead,” Christensen reported. Clarke apparently believed that the oil could be used as a topical pain reliever.

After applying the peppermint oil, Clarke claimed that he “went to the toilet.” While in the airplane lavatory, Clarke said, “I obviously touched my privates,” adding that he must have transferred peppermint oil to his penis since he “felt burning afterwards.”

"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." - Albert Camus

kliks

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